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Review: Whiplash

Are you rushing or are you dragging?

I played the drums all through high school. When I was in junior high, I had an awful band teacher. He was rude and picky and he kind of made me hate the instruments I had grown to love so much. Seeing Fletcher in action made me realize I had it easy.

Andrew (Miles Teller) is a jazz drummer that has been accepted into the most prestigious music school in the country. One that has a studio band run by a very aggressive conductor, Terrence Fletcher. (J.K Simmons) Fletcher pulls Andrew from practice one day and lets him sit in the studio band. He feels a little cocky about it, and soon Fletcher begins to break him down in some pretty extreme ways.

When you think of intense movies, you think of thrillers, war movies, car chases, probably not jazz music. This is honestly one of the most intense movies I've ever seen. I thought I was going to have a genuine anxiety attack on behalf of Andrew a few times. This is brilliant film making, and the ending is one of the best I've ever seen.

Obviously Simmons is great, he's winning every award there is out there and rightfully so, but Teller isn't getting nearly enough credit. This is the best performance I've seen him give too.

31 comments:

I can't wait for this! I have this queued up in my saved section and will bump it to #1 the second it's available. Love the tie in to your school days. I took sax in school...and hated my teacher too...mostly because I wanted to take drums and she wouldn't let me :-P

So glad you loved it! It really was intense as fuck. I felt so emotional, and I hate admitting that because it sounds so ridiculous all typed out, ahha. Just thinking about it sort of gives me a high. That ending was everything!!!Great post!!!

I wasn't expecting to like Whiplash a lot, but it was so amazing. Fletcher sort of reminded me a bit of my teachers too, that they're perfectionists. Miles Teller did give a wonderful performance, the best of his I've seen so far.

Great review. This is the little movie that could. It has caught a lot of people's attention and it seems like there may be more to Miles Teller than the idiotic raunchy comedies. And Simmons is something, right. He has his Oscar in the bag.

I saw this yesterday and concerned about whether it would match the praise given to it from almost every corner of the movie internet world. Thankfully, I found to be a superb film. Best film of the year, and I hate joining bandwagons. Simmons' performance was simply captivating, as was Teller's.

Greatness is appalling in a meritocracy like ours, simply because it cannot be duplicated: hardly anyone is crazy enough to try. Greatness is equally wonderful for those same reasons. Appalling and wonderful are apt adjectives for this great movie.

LAMB #753

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Welcome to my collection of ramblings. I bring you movie reviews, awards coverage, and other things in the wonderful world of film and TV. Most of all, I love talking to fellow movie fans. I'm a bit of a smartass and I probably swear to much. I personally do not use cookies for anything, but the 3rd party widgets on my blog (such as Twitter) do.